Last winter I spent two weeks in the basement of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, documenting ebonized-oak armchairs that Pavel Janák designed for the Artěl workshops in 1912. Their surfaces were cut into planes that catch light like gemstones — each angle casting the shadow that gives the form its weight.
The Prism as Principle
What distinguished the Prague Cubists from their Parisian counterparts was the conviction that faceted geometry was not a pictorial strategy but an architectural one. Janák and Josef Gočár took the prism and made it structural: geometry made tangible, holding the warmth of earthenware and the severity of cut stone at the same time.